Facebook fan page hack: How to publish multiple feeds to your fan page wall

I recently created a Facebook fan page for the RJI Collaboratory — a community of journalists, developers, and others who are building the future of local and niche news, supported by the Reynolds Journalism Institute.

Yes, the Collaboratory has a Ning community site. However, it’s always easier to engage people when you go where they are, rather than demanding they come to your site just to talk and share. Hence the fan page — so we can bring the activity of the Collaboratory to our members who spend more time on Facebook than on the Collaboratory site.

I still hate Facebook, but since it’s so damn popular I have no choice but to use it, especially to connect with various communities. One of the many things that annoy me about Facebook is how difficult they make it to import content from several different feeds onto a fan page’s comment wall.

I’m by no means a Facebook expert, but I just hacked a solution to that particular problem, and thought I’d share it…

WHAT I WANTED TO INTEGRATE:

Besides Facebook, the RJI Collaboratory has several online presences:

I wanted items from all of these to be published to the wall of our Facebook fan page, so that our “fans” and others would see them in their Facebook news feed.

You can import a feed so that its items appear as “notes” on your fan page, which in turn get published to your fan page’s comment wall (Jean O’Brien explains how). However, Facebook only lets you import ONE feed — not several. And each of the Collaboratory’s online presences has its own feed.

MY SOLUTION:

I used the free service Xfruits to combine our Ning, Delicious, and Twitter feeds into a single feed: RJIcollab Aggregator.

Then I imported that aggregated feed into our fan page, using O’Brien’s process.

It seems to be working. Items from Ning, Delicious, and Twitter are all getting posted to our comment wall. Check it out.

…One side benefit of this is that Facebook makes it much easier than Ning to have conversations about specific content items. For instance, on the home page of the Collaboratory on Ning, we have a box that displays the latest links from our Delicious network. However, Ning offers no way for members to post comments about that content.

In Ning communities, you can only have public discussions through comments to blog posts (and Ning doesn’t let you import feeds as blog posts), or in forum threads (which just gets to be a mess and isn’t very findable).

Our hope is that our Facebook fan page will be a useful (and perhaps easier-to-use) complement to our Ning community, as well as a venue for broader distribution and discussion of the Collaboratory.

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on December 23, 2009 at 6:04 pm and filed under Amy's Adventures, collaboration, community, social media, tips. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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I’ve been playing around with this to see if it works better than what I’m doing now.

On the plus side, it’s much easier than my old workflow (zero effort to maintain) and looks better on Facebook than the stuff that comes out of ping.fm.

On the minus side, Facebook pushes the links to my site to the bottom of a secondary page. This is a non-starter for me. Another problem, particularly for news, is that Facebook says it scans the RSS feed “every couple of hours”. Using Ping.fm, I’m able to get breaking news posted to my Facebook page within minutes of publishing it on my site.

Bottom line: This is useful for non-urgent feeds not intended to drive traffic.


1. Barry Parr on January 14th, 2010 at 9:37 am
Thanks. This is really helpful. I thought I’d share my workflow for posting to Facebook and Twitter.

I’m using Yahoo Pipes to filter, edit, and aggregate multiple RSS feeds.

I then use Twitterfeed to post the aggregated feed to Coastsider. Twitterfeed is messy and unreliable, so this might be a better solution — at least for Facebook.

I’m also using Ping.fm to post Coastsider stories to Facebook and Twitter. You can’t automate posting from a feed (they recommend using Twitterfeed) but I’ve been able to mail from Expression Engine to Ping.fm and I’m pretty sure there’s a Wordpress plugin if you swing that way.


2. Barry Parr on December 31st, 2009 at 11:23 am

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By links for 2009-12-24 — contentious.com on December 24, 2009 at 7:00 am

[...] Facebook fan page hack: How to publish multiple feeds to your fan page wall — contentious.com I wrote this to explain how I hacked together social media integration for the RJI Collaboratory community. (tags: RJIcollab social+media integration tutorial twitter facebook delicious feeds RSS) [...]